WordPress.com Goes Gravatar Crazy

Howdy there bloggers! You’ll no doubt remember that when we acquired Gravatar.com, just over a year ago, we intended to fully integrate it into WordPress.com. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally replaced the WordPress.com avatar system with those Globally Recognized Avatars. What does this mean? It means your WordPress.com avatar can now follow you around the web. Your avatar can show up on any Gravatar enabled site, regardless of its affiliation with Automattic!

The old avatar tool in your WordPress.com profiles has been replaced with your current Gravatar (left.) If you click on that icon you’ll be taken to Gravatar.com (and automatically logged into your account) where you can easily change your image (right). You can upload an image from your computer, paste in a link to an image on the internet, or even take a picture of yourself using your computers webcam. Cropping and rating your images are as easy as ever. After you finish your new image will automatically attach to your email address (assuming you only have one email address on your account,) or you will be presented with a simple-as-pie list of your email addresses, and you can attach the new image to any or all of them! Just close the Gravatar window when you’re done.

Of course all of the standard Gravatar features are available to you. Upload as many images as you wish, switch them as often as you like, add as many email addresses as you want to your account, and more features still in the works.

If you find that you have an “old” image for your Gravatar, simply click on the link to change it and then click on the “Use your last WordPress.com Avatar” link to get the new one back. There are bound to be some small hiccups here and there. Just let Support know when something doesn’t work quite right, and we’ll get everything ironed out in no time.

Cheers!
DK

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Gravatars are part of your identity online. They are the images that appear next to comments you leave on any gravatar-enabled blog. And, as for a cool offline use, Gravatar images were used to create badges for WordCamp San Francisco 2008. Pretty neat! Check out http://en.gravatar.com/site/about to find out more about Gravatars.

Your Gravatar is connected to your email address, so if you leave comments on another blog and you want to remain anonymous, make sure that the Gravatar connected to that email address is an appropriate image.

Gravatars and blavatars are different. At WordPress.com, favicons are created using the blavatar from your blog’s Settings page while Gravatars appear next to comments and are created in your account profile page or at http://gravatar.com/

why is there so much white space at the top of this page? It forces the text into the margin and I am unable to read the words on the right side of the blog or whatever and cannot even scroll over. (Not a gravatar issue but you can see what I am talking about up at the top here. Thanks

That random pattern is called an identicon. If you see a random pattern instead of your Gravatar, then you should check your WordPress.com profile page to make sure your image is showing up properly there. Also, keep in mind that blog Administrators can choose whether or not to show Gravatars from their Settings -> Discussion page. If your Gravatar is not showing up on a blog, then they may have chosen not to display Gravatars.

I’d like to have an option to not have a Gravatar.
It seems that once you have one, you either have to either have a pictures or show a blank white space.
It would be nice to say – no Gravatar please – it would save space on my RSS reader.

You can delete your Gravatar if you’d like. To do that, simply hover your mouse over the image in the list at the bottom of your Gravatar manage page, and click the red “X”. See http://en.gravatar.com/site/faq/ for more Gravatar questions and answers.

They are different. A blavatar is a blog avatar and it is displayed in the web address bar next to your blog URL. A Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar and it is displayed next to your comments, in the Authors widget, and some other places depending on how your theme was designed. Gravatars can be used on other websites and applications too. You could see your gravatar on any web-enabled blog or website.

It must be fun to leave us luddites in the dust. But it sure is exhausting trying to figure out that “write” is now “post” and you can’t save a draft anymore. Ever thought of giving us a choice NOT to update? Ah, DOS. Now THERE was a program. . .

This is awesome! I think the gravatars add a lot of character and personality to the blogs. There’s a lot of funny pictures that can be used, if you decide to quit showing your mug, or if you have other characters (which seems to happen on my blog).

The one thing you guys seem to not want to do with gravatars is to make them act like the Post Avatars plugin for WP. There you can choose an image to go at the top of your post, similar to LiveJournal. Blogs with multiple authors would particularly benefit from this, and it seems to me easy to implement on WP.com. That’s really the only use I see for Gravatars in this context 9and outside of comments).